Israeli soldiers operating in Gaza city, July 28, 2024. (Erik Marmor/Flash90)

The date is October, November, or December 2024, or maybe early 2025. The Israeli military has just launched a new operation throughout northern Gaza — “Operation Order and Clean-up,” we’ll call it. The army orders the temporary evacuation of all Palestinian residents north of the Netzarim Corridor “for their personal safety,” explaining that “the IDF is expected to take significant action in Gaza City in the coming days, and wants to avoid harming civilians.”

The order is similar to the one the military issued on Oct. 13, 2023 to the more than 1 million Palestinians living in Gaza City and its environs at the time. But it’s clear to everyone that this time, Israel is planning something else entirely.

Although Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant remain tight-lipped about the real goals of the operation, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, as well as other ministers on the far right, declare them openly. Here, they cite a program that the “Forum of Reserve Commanders and Fighters,” spearheaded by Maj. Gen. (res.) Giora Eiland, proposed just a few weeks ago: ordering all residents of northern Gaza to leave within a week, before imposing a full siege on the area, including shutting off all supplies of water, food, and fuel, until those who remain surrender or die of starvation.

Other prominent Israelis, in recent months, have also called on the military to carry out mass extermination in northern Gaza. “Remove the entire civilian population from the north, and whoever remains there will be lawfully sentenced as a terrorist and subjected to a process of starvation or extermination,” Prof. Uzi Rabi, a senior researcher at Tel Aviv University, elaborated in a radio interview on Sept. 15. And in August, according to a report in Ynet, government ministers had already started pressuring Netanyahu to “cleanse” northern Gaza of its inhabitants.

The Rabi-Eiland plan also aligns with a proposal written in July by several Israeli academics, titled “From a murderous regime to a moderate society: The transformation and reconstruction of Gaza after Hamas.” According to that plan, which was submitted to Israeli decision-makers, “total defeat” of Hamas is a precondition for starting a process of “deradicalization” of Palestinians in Gaza. “It is important that the Palestinian public also has a broad perception of Hamas’ defeat,” its authors argued, adding: “‘First aid’ can begin in areas purged of Hamas.” One of the proposal’s authors, Dr. Harel Chorev, a senior researcher at the Moshe Dayan Center where Rabi also works, expressed full support for Eiland’s starvation plan.

Giora Eiland testifies during a hearing of the civil investigative committee on the October 7 massacre, in Tel Aviv, August 8, 2024. (Avshalom Sassoni/Flash90)

But back to our scenario: “Operation Order and Clean-up” gets underway, and despite the army’s evacuation orders, some 300,000 Palestinians remain among the ruins of Gaza City and its environs, refusing to leave. Perhaps they stay because they saw what happened to their neighbors who left at the beginning of the war, believing that it was a temporary evacuation, and who to this day wander the streets of southern Gaza without a safe place to shelter. Perhaps because they fear Hamas, which calls on residents to refuse Israel’s evacuation orders. Or perhaps because they feel they no longer have anything to lose.

Either way, the army imposes a complete blockade within a week on all those who remain in northern Gaza. Hamas fighters — the Eiland document estimates that there are 5,000 left in the north, but no one really knows their true number — refuse to surrender. On international television and social media, people around the world watch as Gaza City is consumed by mass starvation. “We would rather die than leave,” residents tell journalists.

On Israeli TV, commentators are not convinced that such a move will be decisive to win the war. But they agree that a “campaign of starvation and extermination” is preferable to the army continuing to drag its feet in Gaza. Some voices in the studios warn of the potential damage to Israel’s public relations, but nonetheless the plan obtains the support of the majority of the Jewish-Israeli public. Palestinian citizens of Israel, who intensify their protests against the genocide, are arrested for even posting about it online, and the police forcibly suppress demonstrations by the radical left.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken expresses concern, affirms that the Washington is committed to Gaza’s territorial integrity and the two-state solution, and warns that this latest campaign could sabotage the negotiations for a hostage agreement — but Netanyahu is unmoved. Under pressure from the right, which sees the expulsion of Gaza City’s residents as its opportunity to flatten the area completely and build settlements on top of the ruins, the army begins the “extermination” phase that Rabi outlined.

Since the army has claimed civilians can leave northern Gaza — although soldiers randomly shoot and kill those Palestinian civilians who try to evacuate — it treats anyone who remains in the city as a terrorist. Such a strategy aligns with what Lt. Col. A., commander of the Israeli Air Force’s drone squadron, told Ynet in August about the operation to rescue hostages in Nuseirat Camp: “Whoever did not flee, even if he was unarmed, as far as we were concerned, was a terrorist. Everyone we killed should have been killed.”

Palestinians observe the destruction caused by an Israeli military operation in Nuseirat camp in the central Gaza Strip, June 8, 2024. (Khaled Ali/Flash90)

Gaza City is completely destroyed, and among the ruins lie the bodies of thousands or perhaps tens of thousands of Palestinians. No one knows the exact number, because the area remains a “closed military zone.” Operation Order and Clean-upis crowned a success. The army, as proposed in the Eiland plan, prepares to replicate similar operations in Khan Younis and Deir al-Balah. In coordination with field commanders, apparently without the approval of the General Staff, the revitalized movement to resettle Gaza — which has been waiting in the wings for months — begins establishing the first new communities in areas that have been “purged” of Palestinians.

A likely but not inevitable scenario

There is no certainty that this scenario will materialize. It can be stymied at various junctures: the army could convey that it is not interested in the full occupation of the Gaza Strip, nor the reestablishment of a military government there. The military is aware that such a large-scale operation could lead to the execution of the remaining hostages, as happened in Rafah, and it doesn’t want to be responsible for their murder. So too does it fear that such a large-scale operation in Gaza could trigger a stronger response from Hezbollah, and therefore to an intense war on two fronts, or perhaps more.

Despite all the leniency the U.S. administration has shown for Israel’s genocidal actions in Gaza — starving and annihilating tens of thousands of Palestinians — the next stage may be too much even for the self-professed “Zionist” President Joe Biden and presidential nominee Kamala Harris, who speaks of “Palestinian suffering.” This may well be the move that will force the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to declare that Israel is committing genocide, and expedite the International Criminal Court (ICC) to issue arrest warrants, and not only for Netanyahu and Gallant.

European countries, which until now have been hesitant to sanction Israel, may go all in. Netanyahu could conclude that the international price of such an operation will be too high — the desires of his right-wing allies be damned.

Israelis protest calling for the release of hostages in Gaza outside the Defense Ministry Headquarters in Tel Aviv, September 14, 2024. (Avshalom Sassoni/Flash90)

Israeli society may also pose obstacles to the implementation of the plan. As made evident by the mass demonstrations of recent weeks, large parts of the Jewish-Israeli public have lost faith in the government’s promises of “total victory” in Gaza or the notion that “only military pressure will release the hostages.” Led by the families of the hostages — who have been radicalized since Hamas’ recent execution of the six hostages in a tunnel in Rafah — hundreds of thousands of Israelis, it seems, want not only to see the hostages returned home, but also to put the war behind them. The Rabi-Eiland plan, which will certainly prolong the war in Gaza and likely doom the return of the remaining hostages, may be rejected by hundreds of thousands of demonstrators for precisely these reasons.

However, we must also admit that the scenario I sketched out above is not far-fetched. Since October 7, Israeli society has undergone an accelerated process of dehumanization toward the Palestinians, and it is hard to see the army refuse en masse to carry out such an extermination campaign, certainly if it is presented in stages: first forcing out most residents, followed by the imposition of a siege, and only then the elimination of those who remain.

It is not simply a matter of revenge for the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7. Within the distorted logic that regulates Israeli policy toward the Palestinians, the only way to restore “deterrence” after the military humiliation of October 7 is to completely crush the Palestinian collective, including its cities and institutions.

For some, it might be easy to write off Israeli proposals to “finish the job” in northern Gaza as genocidal bombast, unlikely to be carried out. But they were conceived by Eiland, Rabi, and other influential people — not only those in the “messianic” circle of Ben Gvir and Smotrich. And regardless of what happens over the coming months, the very fact that open proposals to starve and exterminate hundreds of thousands of people are up for debate demonstrates precisely where Israeli society stands today.

Meron Rapoport